Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, a new weekly discussion that searches for the truth about psychiatric prescription drugs and mental health care worldwide.

This podcast is part of Mad in America’s mission to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care. We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.

On the podcast over the coming weeks, we will have interviews with experts and those with lived experience of the psychiatric system.

Thank you for joining us as we discuss the many issues around rethinking psychiatric care around the world.

This week we talk to journalist
and author Robert Whitaker. For many of us, Robert
needs no introduction as he is well known for his award winning
book, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and
the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, which was
released in 2010. Anatomy of an Epidemic is arguably the definitive
account of the realities of psychiatric drugs and completely lays
bare the astonishing rise in mental ill health despite the
availability of psychiatric drugs.

Robert has been a medical writer
at the Albany Times Union newspaper, A journalism fellow at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of publications
at the Harvard Medical School. Besides many papers, journals and
articles, Robert has written five books which include Mad In
America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and The Enduring Mistreatment
of the Mentally Ill in 2001, Anatomy of an Epidemic in 2010 and
Psychiatry Under The Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social
Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform published in 2015.

In this episode we
discuss:

Robert’s background and how that
led to his interest in medical writing

How using Freedom of Information
(FOI) requests allowed Robert to see the full facts behind clinical
trial data

A report from the World Health
organisation that made Robert question the narrative of progress in
Psychiatry

That when you dig into the
psychiatric literature, you find that the burden of mental illness
has increased dramatically after the adoption of a disease
model

How the medical community
reacted to the book, Anatomy of an Epidemic

How Robert wanted to know how
psychiatric drugs affected people over the longer term and not just
for the target symptoms

How early reviews of the book,
Anatomy of an Epidemic, tried to make out it was
dangerous

That, on the whole, psychiatric
drugs increase the chronicity of mental illness

How we came to invent drugs for
mental health issues when we have little to no understanding of the
basis of these conditions

That, when you take psychiatric
drugs, your brain changes and that is what leads to long term harm
and dependance/withdrawal effects

What led to the chemical
imbalance theory and how it fell apart

That the risk to benefit balance
of psychiatric drugs should be explained by the prescriber when
drug therapy is started

How we have medicalised
distress

Why psychiatric drugs are not
‘magic bullets’

Why some doctors and
psychiatrists turn a blind eye to the harm that medications
do

About the Podcast

Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, a new weekly discussion that searches for the truth about psychiatric prescription drugs and mental health care worldwide.
This podcast is part of Mad in America’s mission to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care and mental health. We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.
On the podcast over the coming weeks, we will have interviews with experts and those with lived experience of the psychiatric system. Thank you for joining us as we discuss the many issues around rethinking mental health around the world.
For more information visit madinamerica.com
To contact us email podcasts@madinamerica.com